ADVERTISERS LOVE FREE WILL

“Data ‘R Us” could be the slogan for our era. It used to be that we, the inquirers, were on

one side, and data  were on the other. Scientists undertook their inquiries because they believed that, as a consequence, they would have a secure, fact-based story to tell.

Today the gap between data and us has been erased.  Algorithms, mining Facebook for example, aim “to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.”  

What good is such data?  Follow the money. Scientists mine data because they want an accurate story to tell.  Marketers love the new data because they have something to sell.  

For marketers, “value” is defined as whatever will increase sales for whoever is paying them. Sometimes the admission is delivered deceptively: “The more data you collect from customers…the more value you can deliver to them.” It soon becomes clear that “value” does not means something that is independently good: “And the more value you can deliver to them…the more revenue you can generate.” Generating revenue via data-aided manipulation, i.e. interfering with freedom, is what it’s all about.

Within the world of food, the results of successful advertising are disastrous. When people eat what is best for the revenue of food companies, they are not eating what is

healthy for themselves. The results: a situation in which obesity and early onset diabetes are way more common than they need be.

Most people realize that marketing and advertising have a specific goal:  impacting our powers of adjudication, i.e. our ability to make free, well-informed choices. Why, then is advertising so often defended in the name of freedom rather than understood as the obstruction to freedom that it is?

Here is where philosophy plays a role.  It’s all about the meaning of “freedom.”  

We, inheritors of bad philosophy, continue to confuse freedom with “free will.”  There’s the rub. Freedom and “free will” are NOT the

same thing. Human freedom is the ability of reasonable beings to consider their circumstances intelligently and to elect among possibilities.  “Free will,” by contrast, suggests an inner faculty, completely unconditioned and unaffected by circumstances, one that provides a power at any and all times to make uninfluenced choices. “Free will” is attractive because it offers us a self-description  as somehow disincarnate. It is also dangerous. It encourages us to think in all-or-nothing terms. Either we possess free will or not. Forces shaping and influencing us are irrelevant. Defining freedom strictly in terms of free will impacts our thinking. It discourages concrete questions about what factors favor informed election among options. It encourages the all-or-nothing perspective which directs thought away from examining various ways in which freedom can be enhanced or minimized.

The flawed identification of freedom with ‘free will” provides plenty of cover for marketers. They can defend their work by saying that no matter how much money and expertise is marshalled to shape people’s selections, such individuals continue to have free will.  At the same time they can hire psychological

and data specialists for precisely one reason: to limit freedom. They can thus have it both ways: justifying their practices by saying that there is always “free will,” and adjusting those practices so that they become more and more effective in interfering with freedom.  At the same time they can block the efforts of public servants by claiming that it is they, the public servants rather than the advertisers, who seek to suppress freedom.

Freedom is a great good. It recognizes how we can chart paths for ourselves.  At its best it manifests itself in appraisals and evaluations that results in well-considered judgments. Those judgments, in traditional language, are verdicts, i.e. decisions based on truths. Ver-dict, truth saying, for

marketing, is beside the point, and, really, an obstacle.   The defenders of advertising are friends of free will but not friends of freedom. Adjudication on the basis of evidence is exactly what they seek to eliminate. They are savvy manipulators who construct scenarios, not because they have something important to tell, but because they have something to sell.

FRANKENSTEIN: ABSTRACTION IS EVIL

One of the great scenes in Young Frankenstein is when the creature wanders into the home of a blind man (Gene Hackman at his best).  Blind man and Creature have lots in common: they

are different (blind in one case, large and ugly in the other); because they are different, they are lonely; because they are lonely, they need companionship.

“Companionship” literally means “bread with” another. As a story, Young Frankenstein emphasizes something earlier films missed. The creature is

unloved.  He has no one to break bread with, no companions. What he longs for is a stable, loving family life.

Such domestic felicity is, sadly, closed to the creature because he is so different.  What he most longs for is a companion, someone to share home and hearth, someone who, based on such sharing, will get to know him beyond the physical impressions at which others recoil.  Victor Frankenstein promises that he will put together another creature, this time a female, the much needed, much desired companion. Alas, Victor reneges on his promise.  The creature, betrayed and hurt, turns vengeful and a violent.

It all goes back to “bread together,” and to the awareness that comes from time spent in loving companionship.  The book of Genesis famously has Adam

“knowing” Eve, a kind of knowing that leads to pregnancy. This use of the term also indicates a kind of knowing that emerges from companionship, from spending a life together. It’s a term that suggests awareness of what another is like based on familiarity, on relationality. When we make a claim like "I know her/him really well," it's quite different from knowing that 3 plus 2 equals 5 or that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.

The sad aspect of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that no one takes the time to “know” the creature along the model of companionship.  The people with whom the creature interacts cannot get past his “otherness.” Instead of thinking and being thoughtful, they remain on the level of abstract, immediate sense perception.  What results is a truncated kind of awareness. The concrete, whole self is ignored. One aspect alone, ugliness, is highlighted

There is an important lesson here for philosophy. Abstraction, often touted by philosophers, is actually an ally of evil. Those who judge the creature based on  his looks are reacting abstractly, just as those who would judge by skin color alone, or gender, or religion.

The surprising lesson for philosophy is one that has been articulated by Alfred North Whitehead.  Philosophy is not the arena for abstractions. Rather, philosophy

should be the critic of abstractions.  Humans feel a strong tug in the the direction of abstracting, of simplifying, of separating, isolating, disconnecting.  Philosophy, tied to wisdom and to thoughtfulness, has a special role to play: it must provide a counterbalance.

The hard corollary: thinking and abstraction do not go together.   Logic and abstraction go together. Calculative rationality (planning in terms of fixed goals and the most efficient means to arrive at them) depends on abstraction.  “Thinking,” or being “thoughtful” is quite different. Indeed, abstraction is a hindrance to thinking and thoughtfulness. The latter’s mode of reflection results in a particular sort of claim, the “I know" that results from companionship.

Martin Heidegger made much of the link between “thinking” and “thanking.” Thinking (and its partner thoughtfulness) is a grateful response to our being in the world. It is not separated from affectivity. Its aim is full awareness about what is, an awareness not accessible to those who remain detached from what they are seeking to understand.

Thinking thus gives rise to a kind of concrete knowing, the one Latin calls cognoscere, French connaître, and German kennen. (As opposed to the more abstract scire, savoir, and wissen.)  This awareness, this companionship-based-getting-to-know, cannot happen when thinking and abstracting are confused.  Abstraction, specifically undertaken for specific purposes, plays an important role, especially in laboratory sciences.  In everyday life, though, the allure of abstraction must be resisted.

In Mary Shelley’s novel, only the blind man is thoughtful in regard to the creature. Everyone else succumbs to abstract perception.  Ugliness, size, and skin texture are all they pay attention to. Abstraction is plentiful. Thoughtfulness is rare.

Young Frankenstein may be a comedy, but its take on the creature’s story is revealing. The characters in Young Frankenstein live out the knowledge of

companionship in relation to the creature. Shelley’s novel depicts the sad state that results when abstract knowledge rather than companionship knowledge dominates.  

Unforget Stomach, Remember Socrates

Rowman and Littlefield has now made I Eat, Therefore I Think available in paperback. This comes as the number of philosophy books addressing food issues  is growing. Some recent examples include:  Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, Corine Pelluchon, Les Nourritures: Philosophie du Corps Politique,  Julian Baggini, The Virtues of the Table: how to Eat and Think.  In addition, there is the book authored by Lisa Heldke and me, Philosophers at Table.

Why the upsurge? There is renewed interest in everyday activities typically ignored by philosophers.  Food studies has burgeoned.  Both hunger and obesity offer contemporary challenges.  Issues of sustainability and the treatment of animals have also provoked reflection.

Where does my book fit into the discussion?  Perhaps the most important lesson is one the book does not explicitly mention: philosophy is not an abstract discipline.  Philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, is a critic of abstractions.  “But, wait,” readers are probably thinking, “Isn’t philosophy abstract thinking?”  “That’s what we learned in philosophy class.”  

All well and good, but partial and misguided.  In its historical trajectory, philosophy has indeed come to be associated with abstraction and mind puzzles.  I Eat, Therefore I Think aims at changing this take on philosophy.

To accomplish this, I began with a clumsy term:  “unforgetting.”  “Un-forgetting” literally translates the Greek word for ‘“truth,”  aletheia.  My book seeks to unforget that we are stomach-endowed. It might seem obvious that humans are creatures for whom the stomach plays a major role, but philosophers of a particular period have tended to ignore this.   Second the book seeks to unforget, i.e. reinsert, some Socratic elements into philosophy.  

A few Socrates-inspired elements stand out:

Dialogue. Socrates believed that thinking through an issue involved cooperation with others. Thinking is not an isolated activity that goes on in the head. Thinking, in the fullest sense, takes place via dialogue.

Irony. Socrates embraced “irony” in its philosophical sense: an awareness that even our best formulations somehow fall short. Philosophy’s task is unending because our articulations, while they get something right, are, at the same time, lacking in other ways.  Reality is too complex to be captured in any snapshot.

Agora.  Socrates practiced philosophy in the agora, the marketplace, the public square.  The topics he discussed were rooted in the living concerns of flesh and blood people.

What? Socrates showed how philosophy is not concerned with the question “why.” Its purview is the question “what.”  What is friendship? What is love?  What is virtue?  Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and the “what” questions allow for actual, helpful answers that guide “wisdom.” ”“Why” questions, e.g. “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  “Why are we here?” are more the province of myth, non-philosophical ways to deal with questions about absolute origins or absolute ends.  

How does a stomach-friendly help re-invigorate these four Socratic themes?  A major metaphorical alteration is first needed: thinking of conceptual abstractions as recipes. Then, just as recipes, though helpful, can be critiqued and altered, so philosophy can undertake its role as “critic of abstractions.” The same move helps philosophy become Socratic once again.

Dialogue and the Agora.  Recipes involve dialogue.  We start where we are, in the agora. The cultural heritage in which we find ourselves privileges a conceptual framework, a series of recipes.  Engaging in dialogue with that tradition, we critique, we restore, we revise received recipes, we develop new ones. In this process, we are often aided by adding a dialogue with other traditions.  

Irony. Recipes are never fixed, finished and final, i.e. the slippage between formulation and reality, a slippage which identifies genuine irony, is ever-present.  What counts, in the end, is how recipes become manifest in experience.  The philosophical “criticism” of abstractions involves the back and forth between abstractions and the way they play out in lived experience.

What, not why. When we think about recipes, the ‘’what” dimension dominates.  Questions about ultimate origins and ends are unanswerable apart from storytelling, from myths. These, it must be noted, may be religious or they may be evolutionary.  Either way, they are not philosophical.  The recipe focus, which begins by humbly accepting the simple fact of our being here, tends rather to highlight “what” questions.”   What makes a meal delicious and nutritious?  What makes a life good? Starting with only vegetables can we do to come up with a delicious/nutritious combination?  What is the extent of justice?  Does it encompass non-human animals?

I Eat, Therefore I Think offers itself as the kind of corrective that will re-define philosophy as both the critic of abstractions and the friend of Socrates.  Hopefully, the paperback version will allow those ends to be widely discussed and disseminated.

Short Readings: Philosophy and Food

“Use your noodle,"  “ruminate,” "chew the fat," there are several food metaphors for the open-ended process of thinking.  In a related way, “eat drink and be merry,”  “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” indicate some substantive philosophical positions: hedonism, relativism, economic conservatism.
Aristotle had no problem using food language.  He associated friendship with food, referring, quite rightly, to an ancient proverb that identified friends as those “who have eaten salt together.”  On the other hand, Ludwig Feuerbach, supporting a too-simple materialism, uttered the famous “man is what he eats.” (Der Mensch ist was er isst), a cute pun, but a misleading and thus false phrase.

Feuerbach’s example serves as a cautionary tale. Philosophers who are interested in food need not  be those who would reduce the complexities of human existence to minimal physiological procedures.  Cooking, feasting, sharing, along with associated rituals, provide a fuller picture of how the combination nature-culture must always be kept in mind. Attempts to separate them, to say, for example we are merely “what we eat,” should be avoided.  A more accurate phrase would be: we are how we eat.  The way we deal with our need for nutrition is one major marker of how we understand ourselves.

My own interest in the food/philosophy intersection emerged after a sabbatical year in France.  Upon return, with an inkling for something we had missed, we ordered some local pizza.  I went to to pick it up.  In front of me was a young man. He ordered two slices and

a can of soda, went out onto the sidewalk, turned the two slices over each other, swallowed them quickly, alternating with gulps from his soft drink.  After tossing the can into a nearby trash container, he moved on.  This was dinner.

It also represented a microcosm of meaning. It indicated a specific take on how the young man situated himself vis à vis the key relations that characterize human life: to the natural world, to contemporaries, to ancestors, to progeny, to transcendence.  His action reversed the “only connect” adage of E.M. Forster.  
The important point was that the “eat-alone-and-hurriedly” habit, i.e. “only disconnect,” spoke volumes about philosophical positions that have become commonplace: time is a precious commodity; food preparation and eating represent ways  of wasting such time; eating is not a sacred act that connects us in gratitude to the bounty provided by the natural world; eating is not a social act;  beauty and taste are expendables; much more valuable are convenience and efficiency.

There’s a lengthy philosophical trajectory behind all this. It is one that transformed flesh and blood humans into “thinking things,” (René Descartes) or “rational agents” (Immanuel Kant.) These “rational agents” tended more and more to be understood apart from the ongoing activities associated with our fuller flesh and blood dimensions.  Rodin’s “Thinker” became the iconic figure associated with the philosopher.  Plato had given us his Symposium, a dinner followed by a drinking party, and Luther had promoted “Table Talk” as suitable locales for serious deliberation.  

The dominant tradition went the other way.  The idea that a better image for exemplifying a fully human context would be a wedding feast or other shared meal, faded to the periphery.  “The Thinker” reigned supreme.  Michel Serres, a contemporary who does take ordinary food practices seriously, has the best response: “give that guy a roll of toilet paper.”

As I mentioned in my first post, there are some philosophers bucking the trend. Anyone interested in pursuing this newer take would be well advised to check out the website put together by David Kaplan. 

There are also many books,  but for for shorter pieces, I would suggest the following:

Michael Symons, "Epicurus, the Foodie's Philosopher," in Fritz Allhof and Dave Monroe, Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, 2009

Lisa Heldke, "The Unexamined Meal is Not Worth Eating: Or, Why and How Philosophers (Might, Could/Do Study Food," Food, Culture & Society, 9.2 (2006): 201-219.

------"Philosophy and Food," in Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies (2013).

Michiel Korthals, "The Birth of Philosophy and Contempt for Food," Gastronomica, Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer 2008: 62-69.

Raymond Boisvert, "Cooking Up a New Philosophy," The Philosophers' Magazine," Issue 61, 2nd quarter, 2013.

------"Philosophy Regains its Senses," Philosophy Now, 31, 2001.

Food and Philosophy

Welcome to a blog devoted to an unusual combination: food and philosophy. Unusual in that both regular folks and professional philosophers ignore how food and philosophy intersect.

The intersection does show up in a joke about what not to say in a philosophy job interview:  “Well, I'd like to finish my dissertation, but I just recently got into cajun cooking, and I want to explore that for a while.”  The joke works because of a great incongruence, Philosophy and food should  not mix.

But mixing them is just what an intrepid group of philosophers is doing (more on them in a subsequent blog).   It’s an uphill struggle, but we’re making progress.  My own contribution is the book after which this blog is named I Eat, Therefore I Think: Food and Philosophy. 

What difference do food considerations make for philosophy?  Let’s start with an important ideal, freedom, and a well-regarded philosopher, David Hume.  Hume is a hero of mine because he always tried to be sensible and reasonable.  (First philosophical aside: “sensible,” and “reasonable” are positive terms for food-friendly folks; the more typical, and exclusionary, “rational” is not).  Hume also loved to cook and eat.  He was one of the Western tradition’s two famously large philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas being the other. But Hume lived in the 18th century, a century dominated by a particular philosophical assumption: everything starts out separate and isolated.  The general grasp (i.e. philosophical take) on the human condition was built around an image of humans as essentially self-sufficient entities, an attitude still around today. (Second aside: yesterday’s philosophy is today’s common sense). This “we are fundamentally meant to be self-sufficient” attitude had been translated by an earlier philosopher, John Locke, into an understanding of freedom as meaning mostly “leave me alone.”  

All of this makes perfect sense, if we forget the food dimension of our lives. How could anyone have envisioned humans as self-sufficient?  That being left alone would bring about actual freedom to act effectively? Think about “I am free to speak Finnish”, a claim that means something only if I can actually carry on a conversation.  Simply to say “no one is stopping me from learning Finnish” is a prerequisite to freedom, not its manifestation.

 It took a lot of effort to arrive at the “we are self-sufficient and our highest ideal is to be left alone” position. That effort involved self-imposed amnesia: ignoring our need to feed.  We enter the world hungry and dependent from the get-go.  When it comes to food, we don’t want to be left alone. Hunger makes us both recognize connections and want to enhance them: with those involved in agriculture, in storing, transporting, distributing, preparing food and those who share it with us.  It also occasions a recognition of dependence on natural factors, sun, earth, rainfall, bacteria, earthworms--the cluster that provides fertile soil.

It is true, that, every now and then, we like solitude. This is one of our aspirations.  Still, It is only one and it arises in particular contexts.  By contrast, when we think of ourselves as hungry beings, we don’t find it unusual to extend “hunger” metaphorically.  Aristotle claimed that humans had a natural desire to know.   The word translated as “desire,” orexis, could more accurately have been translated “appetite.” Aristotle could have added that we hunger for lots of things, friends, people we can depend on, vengeance, beauty, triumphs, peaceful coexistence, self-interest, challenges, wealth, etc.   Our relation to food is thus typical in an important way: far from being self-sufficient and self-enclosed, we are appetitive creatures, bundles of tendencies, which, when well selected and channelled, as with a properly balanced diet, can enhance our lives. On the other hand,  like an out- of-sync-diet, a badly combined bundle can be harmful. (Third aside: the word "diet" originally meant "way of life.") 

If we wished to use fancy terms, we might say that returning food to its proper place in philosophy would help understand humans as “orexic,” i.e. as needy creatures driven to make connections.  Neediness and dependence are not automatically pejorative; nor are the wants that accompany them. By contrast, “an-orexia,” seeking, not proper channeling, but rigid control and domination, is problematic.  So is “pan-orexia” simply letting random appetites dominate our activities. 

The ancient Greeks favored moderation, getting the balance right.  When philosophers, and the rest of us (cultures are rooted in sedimented philosophy), forget the significance of food, other ideals, misleading ones, move to the center.  “Just leave me alone and I will be free” is a prominent one today.